Tag Archives: Cooperative

Helldiving For Fun and Profit

Over the ridiculous number of years since I first started this blog I’ve developed the unfortunate habit of writing very terse impressions, if any at all, of the online games I play. This is especially regrettable given how much time I often sink into them. That’s part of the problem though – when you’re playing an MMO, a live service game, or just an online game you’re particularly hooked on, when is the right time to jump off the treadmill and write something up about it? In the early days of this blog the intent was actually to write about my online sessions themselves rather than focusing on final thoughts about a game, but with so many things competing for my free time combined with the effort it often takes to try to write something up, that quickly fell by the wayside. As such, other than briefly mentioning that it was in fact my 2024 game of the year, I somehow still haven’t talked about Helldivers 2 yet…

“Getting rushed by bugs immediately upon respawn. Yikes!”

I first heard about the original Helldivers and how much chaotic fun it could be around the time it launched back in 2015. I was definitely intrigued, but I never actually got around to trying it out. Fast forward to 2024, and owing largely to not really being in the PlayStation ecosystem at the time, the sequel was barely on my radar. I’d read the random skeptical comment about whether Arrowhead had the chops for such an ambitious sequel, but that was about it. Shortly after it launched, however, I stumbled upon a video or two that made the game look utterly amazing and it didn’t take much more before my interest was abosolutely piqued. The one problem I had was that this game is, like its predecessor, very co-op focused, and I’ve made the mistake of buying into co-op heavy games without a dedicated friend group to play with more than once in the past, and felt like that was a lesson… eh, mostly learned. Not wanting to admit defeat, I threw some feelers out to a few different friend groups, but as I’d predicted, no one bit. Then, quite randomly, one of my co-workers (who I’d actually never gamed with before) told me he’d just bought it and was loving it so far, and asked if any of us might be interested in playing it with him sometime. I picked it up that very evening.

Let me take a step back and give a quick overview of the game for the uninitiated. Helldivers 2 is a sci-fi online cooperative PvE third person shooter with persistent character progression, and is not unlike something like Vermintide and Darktide or Deep Rock Galactic, a genre which itself seems to have had its roots in the awesome Left 4 Dead series. Thematically, it barrows heavily from the 1997 Starship Troopers movie, but more on that later. The basic premise is that you and your squad are super expendable soldiers dispatched onto alien worlds to perform a variety of nearly suicidal missions on a large, open map, before waiting to be extracted in what can often be a tense final stand. The action is visceral, with huge hordes of enemies, massive explosions, and purposely higher than normal odds of killing yourself and/or your own squadmates in what are often hilarious moments of insane chaos. Yeah, I think that’s pretty much it in a nutshell!

“Picking my next mission aboard my destroyer.”

As soon as you launch the game you’re met with an intro movie that pitch-perfectly sets the tone, casting the player as a volunteer for Super Earth’s elite “peacekeeping force”, the Helldivers, whose job it is to spread “managed democracy.” The on-the-nose darkly humorous satire poking fun at western patriotism is, again, more than a little reminiscent of Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. You’re then thrown into a tutorial where you learn the basic controls and the humorous worldbuilding doesn’t let up. You’re next tasked with christening your destroyer (the ship that serves as each Helldiver’s personal between mission hub) by combining some pre-selected words to come up with your own ridiculous but lore appropriate name (mine is “SES Distributor of Truth”.) By the time you’re on your destroyer and ready to go on your first real mission, you’re already totally indoctrinated in the lore, or at least in the spirit of it. This is a great thing for a co-op game as, like Deep Rock Galactic’s legions of drunkard “Rock and Stone!” shouting space dwarves, most of the player base is aligned with a sense of casual roleplay that adds to the fun and a real sense of community. It’s so effective that Arrowhead probably doesn’t even need to employ the guy who, acting as something of a Dungeon/Game Master, handcrafts elements of the overarching campaign… but please keep him!

After spending a little while exploring my destroyer and the various options in the UI, I was already very impressed with the presentation. Everything felt well-polished and slick, even if I didn’t know exactly what a lot of what I was seeing actually was.

“The squad assessing a Terminid nest from afar. Real far.”

With my work friend not yet online, I decided to hop into a “quickplay” game with randos. My random squad of hapless FNGs landed in a tight ravine under the cover of a fairly dark night and almost immediately began getting swarmed by Terminids, one of Helldivers 2’s enemy factions who are extremely reminiscent of the “bugs” from, once again, the Starship Troopers movie. I had no real clue what I was doing, so I just quietly followed everyone else’s lead, and it was pure fucking chaos. Assault rifle fire lighting up the area, gore and body parts flying, grenades exploding, people dying. Holy shit! At some point I picked up a large machine gun support weapon dropped by one of my comrades who had traded it for something else they found and quickly started to have a lot of fun by hanging back and playing fire support, diving into prone and laying down a hail of bullets with each encounter. After that mission, I figured out how to customize my loadout so I could start bringing my own machine gun with me, and the rest of my afternoon practically disappeared. Now absolutely jonesing for more, I jumped on again for another session that evening, and this time hooked up with my friend. Playing with voice comms and something more closely resembling teamwork only served to add another layer of fun to the game, even if we did have to either play as a duo or rely on randoms to fill out our squad’s third and fourth slots. I was absolutely hooked.

So back to the mechanics, the basic structure of a mission looks something like this: On your destroyer, you head to the mission table and pick a sector, a planet within that sector, and a mission or set of missions on that planet. There’s a number of procedurally generated planets with different biomes, minor hazards, and weather conditions. Mission types depend on the difficulty you select and the enemy you’re facing, which include the aforementioned bug-like Terminids, the Terminator-like robotic Automatons, and the newly introduced very sci-fi, zombie-creating Illuminate. There’s a fair variety of mission objectives, such as destroying enemy facilities, killing specific high value enemy-types, retrieving and/or activating something, but they all ultimately play out relatively similarly. As an aside, I’ve always found it amusing just how so many of these missions, especially the secondary objectives, feel like extremely simple grunt work that SEAF (Super Earth Armed Forces) probably simply needed “a pair of hands” and “boots on the ground” to perform. “Sure, send us on a literal suicide mission simply to go turn a few leavers and press a few buttons to get an otherwise automated mineral extraction site going again? Why not?!” I guess that’s just SOP for the Helldivers, though.

“Hellpods shooting down to a planet’s surface.”

Anyway, you jump into your “Hellpod” and select your loadout of stratagems and a booster, and once the whole team is ready, your Hellpods launch like artillery shells out of a massive cannon onto the planet’s surface. From there, your team has to plot your course from wherever you picked to land to each of your objectives. Typically there’s a fairly easy pattern you can employ, such as a simple clockwise or anti-clockwise loop from one objective to the next, and finally to the exfiltration point. Along the way, you’ll come across secondary objectives, enemy outposts, and points of interest which can sometimes include supplies, support weapons, samples, medals, and even super credits. More on all those later. Of course, those points of interest are often teaming with enemies, and you’ll also have to contend with patrols and even enemies calling in more enemies, leading to sometimes needing to fend off multiple waves of them. Once your main objectives are complete, or if you run out of time, you make your way to the exfiltration point and call down the shuttle, which takes an uneasy 90 seconds or so as your enemies make one last assault, again, usually consisting of several intense waves.

Of course, that’s all incredibly reductive. I didn’t mention how you need to call down special support weapons and equipment (including vehicles) based on the “stratagems” you picked at the beginning of the mission by throwing a beacon down at where you want them to land, or how stratagems have a time between re-use and with all of the Eagle-1 assault ship based stratagems, a number of re-uses between when the Eagle has to return to your destroyer for a lengthier re-arm. I didn’t mention how every stratagem and pretty much every other in-game interactive object requires a QTE-like pattern of quick key/button presses which have to be executed properly. These aren’t difficult, but executing under extreme stress, which is often the case, can lead to a minor fumble with major consequences. I didn’t mention how dying works – that is, if you die, your team mates have to use a reinforcement stratagem they throw down to call you back in, and you have a limited reinforcement budget. You also have the ability to similarly request a resupply so that you and your team can restock on ammunition, grenades, and the all-important healing stims.

“Time for a little Dance Dance Revolution!”

And I didn’t really mention the stratagems themselves. In addition to being able to request a larger support weapon, there are things like defensive drones, shields, and distributable supply packs, and more stationary defenses like sentry drones of various types, minefields, and manable turrets. More importantly, you have one of the standout features of the game in the form of often impressively devastating strikes coming from both orbital attacks launched from your destroyer and airstrikes delivered by the aforementioned Eagle-1. There’s a large variety of these, from attacks meant to devastate a wide area of light targets, such as the Eagle Napalm Airtrike, to those made to hit a single heavily armored target with pin-point accuracy, like the Orbital Railcannon Strike. The moments when a huge strike hits exemplify Helldiver 2’s immersive, often very cinematic graphics, filled with impressive looking explosions, destructible buildings and terrain, and intense particle and lighting effects. Of course, they can also exemplify the game’s reputation for intentionally embracing hilarious accidental “friendly fire” team killing incidents as well. There have been a small handful of other games, such as Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, which had similar air strike mechanics, and it has never not been fun mechanic to me.

In the end, this all comes together to feel like a weird blend of something like a cooperative, PvE version of a Battlefield game (though Planetside 2 might be a closer comparison.) That is to say, a lightly tactical shooter mixed with an array of interesting tools and a huge open-world battlefields which both give players a lot of freedom with when and how to complete objectives and engage in combat, and leads to some amazing emergent moments.

“The glorious aftermath of an perfectly executed orbital strike.”

Back on your destroyer, you’re shown your mission statistics, the experience points and other rewards you got from the mission, and a rating. Rewards come in several forms. Of course, you gain experience points to level up your Helldiver, though leveling up really only affects some gating around certain stratagems and not much else. There are also Requisition Slips, which are the main currency you’ll be using to purchase new stratagems and ship upgrades, and are awarded fairly generously alongside XP. The ship upgrades also require a much rarer currency, samples. Samples are picked up around the map in missions and have to be carried to the end of the mission and successfully extracted with to earn, which is harder than it sound since they’re also dropped upon death… and if you haven’t figure this out by now, you will die. Probably a lot. These can take a lot more work to grind out, especially given that there are three types which correspond to different difficulty levels, and the two associated with more difficult missions won’t be available at all until you progress up the ladder. Still, ship upgrades are valuable, but they’re also more of a long term progression system. Finally we have War Medals and Super Credits. War Medals are the currency used to purchase items in “War Bonds” which are Helldivers 2’s battle passes. Super Credits are the game’s actual cash equivalent currency, used to purchase items in the “Super Store” as well as the War Bonds themselves.

Helldivers 2 takes a similar approach to Halo Infinite when it comes to battle passes and its purchases. War Bonds contain a number of cosmetic items, such as armor, helmets, banners, capes, and emotes, as well as the occasional new piece of equipment (including weapons) and even sometimes access to special stratagems. Essentially, everything you can progress in the game except for ship upgrades and your character’s level can be found in War Bonds. War Bonds are not time limited, so once you own one you can spend your Medals in whichever ones you want whenever you want, which is handy since you may very well find yourself trying to prioritize going after a few particular items in multiple War Bonds first. The Super Store works like Halo Infinite’s originally did, which is to say it’s unfortunately entirely based around FOMO. You’re presented with a small number of items, mostly just cosmetics, every couple of days. I’m not a huge fan of that system, but there aren’t that many items in rotation, and I’m not nearly as obsessed with cosmetics in this game as I was with Infinite either, thankfully. The inclusion of new weapons and other legitimately game changing items in the War Bonds and the store is a little controversial, as despite being an entirely cooperative game, there are naturally still “flavors of the month” and/or “meta” builds which often include them, but again, this is an entirely PvE game, so it’s not exactly “pay-to-win” in a way anything close to a more competitive game could be.

“You can optionally aim down sight/scope for extra precision.”

Beyond that, your ship lets you customize your character with those aforementioned armor sets, helmets, capes, banners, emotes, and most importantly, your primary and secondary weapons and grenades. These are just parts of your standard loadout, and not linked to the whole picking stratagems thing you do just before each drop, though perhaps just as important. There’s a good variety of weapon types, from assault rifles, shotguns, and DMR primary weapons, to pistols, grenade launchers, and even melee secondary weapons for those who like to experiment with different playstyles (or more likely, amusing “meme builds.”) Oh, and I should also mention that your armor comes in three different varieties, ranging from light to heavy, which trade off speed, mobility, and stamina for protection. Armor sets also includes a passive ability which usually grants the wearer a couple of bonuses, such as increased grenade capacity or reduced fire damage, for example. The basic armor in this game has a pretty cool, unique look to it, though designs for newer armors, as well as the designs of enemies and vehicles borrow liberally from all of the place. Of course, we have obvious Starship Troopers influence, but there’s also a little Halo, Planetside, Earth Defense Force, and perhaps even some Warhammer 40,000 in there as well. It’s not too blatant, and it mostly all gels into something fairly cohesive, and importantly there are no ultra ridiculous immersion-breaking cosmetics either, thankfully.

Progression can move pretty slow if you’re not pouring absolutely tons of time into mission after mission with a full squad. To get more, faster, you’ll want to progress to higher and higher difficulties. These grant more experience points (via a multiplier) and medals, plus access to those higher tiers of samples. The tradeoff, however, is that the mission types change and new enemies appear, including some massive, very difficult to kill ones. The most notable element here is the armor values at play, which ranges between unarmored, light to heavy armored, and tank, with several steps to many of these. To kill enemies with higher armor values you’ll need weapons that can penetrate or otherwise damage these types of armor. This means that as you progress, you’ll also want to develop your loadouts accordingly. For instance, playing solo I could easily wipe the floor on Medium difficulty, but recently moving up to Challenging and Hard and beyond, I ended up replacing my primary weapon with one that could do medium penetration, a secondary that could do anti-tank damage (for emergencies) and stratagems – a support weapon, an airstrike, and a sentry turret – that could all do heavy to anti-tank levels of damage.

“Solo. Checking my mini-map for blips – things were suspiciously quiet.”

Speaking of soloing, not only did I regularly play with my work buddy, but one of my old [TPG] chums Zabka (AKA JoeyPants) randomly started joining us too, and soon we had a fairly regular trio with the fourth often being filled by a friend of one or the other, or a rando. It was honestly a blast playing with a dedicated crew again, which was the icing on top of why this was my 2024 game of the year. Unfortunately, my work friend and I eventually stopped finding ourselves in-game at the same time, so we stopped playing together as much, and then Zabka just seemingly dropped off the face of the earth, and next thing I knew I found myself either having to play with squads of randoms again or going it alone. Playing solo in Helldivers 2 isn’t nearly as depressingly unsatisfying as it can be in many of these sorts of co-op focused games, but it’s also quite a bit more challenging given that less people means less stratagems, less eyes on the horizon, less shots coming from less angles, etc. It’s definitely doable, even up to the highest difficulty levels for highly skilled players, but it’s nowhere near as fun to me. As mentioned, I recently found myself hopping on and trying to improve my solo game, which meant quite a few tweaks to my loadout and tactics, but it’s been rewarding to see myself progress this way. This won’t really sustain me though, so sadly, unless any of my friends suddenly develop an interest in Helldivers 2, I’m likely more or less done with the game.

Regardless of whether I keep trudging away at solo dives, start playing with randoms again, find a new squad, or just hang up my cape entirely, I’ve absolutely loved my time with Helldivers 2 so far. If what I’ve described sounds at all enjoyable to you, especially if you have a few friends to play with, I’d highly recommend checking it out.

Politicians and Other Psychopaths

Returning to something more traditional for my partner and I, the good old narrative heavy modern take on the adventure game, which we’d played so many of together over the years, we played our very first ever Supermassive Games title, The Quarry. Supermassive is probably best known for its PlayStation exclusive Until Dawn, and from what I gather, there are quite a lot of similarities between the two games – I’d even read that The Quarry was the product of an aborted attempt to make an Until Dawn 2. For better or for worse, since I’ve yet to play Until Dawn, I won’t be tempted to fill this entire review with those kinds of fun comparisons. They’ve also got the Dark Pictures Anthology series, which I gather consists of similar, though smaller and generally less ambitious games that each tackle different horror subgenres.

“In true horror movie style, it doesn’t take long for shit to get real.”

Like those titles, The Quarry is also a horror game. I went into it somewhat blind, and was pleasantly surprised by having my assumptions about what the game was about quickly challenged – judging it by descriptions I’d read and trailers I’d seen, it looked like your stereotypical Friday the 13th style slasher affair. You know, a bunch of teens at a summer camp in the woods getting picked off one by one by a deranged psychopath, that sort of thing. It is that, but, being vague so that others might have the same experience as I did, it also, almost immediately, introduces monsters, witches, and weird Southern family tropes, which kept me guessing about where the story was actually going (at least for a little while) while being appropriately creepy throughout.

I have to say that The Quarry, overall, looks fantastic. The graphics are fairly realistic to the point of occasional moments of “uncanny valley” when it comes to those trickier to nail things like facial animations. Even more so because of their preference to base character faces on their actual voice actors, including some you’ll likely recognize – David Arquette’s character was featured heavily in promotional material, for instance. Overall though, the game looks really, really good. For the most part, the UI, hell, the entire presentation of the game, is also really nice and quite polished. Being that this was my first Supermassive game, I didn’t quite know what to expect in terms of quality, but this definitely feels a million miles away from your stereotypical low budget PC-only modern adventure game. Oh, and the audio here is all great too – the effects, music, and voice acting are very good, and more importantly, they’re all used really effectively too. On a technical level alone, most of my hesitation about jumping onto the Supermassive bandwagon quickly disappeared.

“Choices are usually binary and often timed.”

Gameplay-wise, The Quarry feels like a weird melding of your minimally interactive modern FMV or “interactive movie” games, like Late Shift, your old school, very interactive point and click adventure games, and the middle ground, something like Telltale’s Walking Dead series, for example. I think it works quite well, providing opportunities for puzzle solving and even action sequences as well as dialog choices and other decision making, while leaving a ton of room for setting the scene or advancing the narrative via long cutscenes. Interestingly, you’ll be jumping between playing each of a group of camp counselors, and the co-op mode lets you assign who plays which specific characters, and even lets you divide up the entire cast to different players via the online “Wolf Pack” mode. My partner and I divvied up the characters based on their profiles and swapped the controller as needed, which, in terms of who gets to play for how long, was more than a little random at times, but was fun and more tonally consistent than having to take turns making sometimes contradictory decisions as the same character.

“YESSS! A game the ridicules me for missing useless collectibles!”

I’m still of two minds over whether this is a actually bad thing, but sometimes these major branching moments didn’t come about by an obvious decision. For example, early in the game there was an action scene where, if we had reacted quickly enough, we could have killed a character which would have had a huge effect on the rest of the story, and the fact that this was based on a semi-twitchy, high pressure scene definitely caught us by surprise. Oh, and speaking of which, yes, major characters can die or be affected in very big ways that have ramifications throughout the rest of your playthrough, which was one of the charms of Telltale’s adventure games as well, and feels cranked up to 11 here. I understand this was also the case with Until Dawn and most of Supermassive’s other adventure games, and while this could be criticized as being gimmicky, personally, I’m a fan.

I can’t say I absolutely loved every character or every story beat, plus the ending felt a little sudden, which sadly isn’t an uncommon issue in these types of games. In this case though, I could definitely see myself playing through it again one of these days, especially given all of the fun extras and collectibles and the insane amount of deviation and branching your choices and actions can bring about – apparently there are 186 variations of the ending available. As I said, insane. In the end, we enjoyed it enough to buy the entire first season of the Dark Pictures Anthology the next time it was on sale. ‘Nuff said!

Next up, wanting to play an actual cooperative game on PC that wasn’t yet another tree punching survival game, I came across the We Were Here series of asymmetrical co-op games. Now, we’ve played a few co-op focused games, most notably the Hazelight ones, but reviews made We Were Here sound like it was much more likely to test the strength of our relationship. Now that’s true horror! 😅

“A creepy castle filled with creepy puzzles.”

The setup is simple: Without much further explanation, you and your partner are walking with a larger group through a frozen wasteland and split off to check out and then take refuge in a mysterious castle. The next thing you know, you’re both waking up to discover that you’ve been split up. One player takes the role of the “librarian” whose primary job is to, confined to a small area, reference books and other useful objects spread throughout. The other player is the “explorer” whose job it is to, well, explore. That mostly involves navigating from room to room and investigating the mysteries therein, which ultimately lead to the way to the next area, like multiple relatively simple escape rooms chained together. Each player is given a walkie-talkie near the beginning to communicate with one another (using in-game VOIP, a feature I always really like even though I usually eventually end up abandoning for out-of-game voice chat) and from then on, the game is on.

Naturally, communication is key to solving these puzzles – the explorer might need to describe symbols or pictures to the librarian, or vice versa. That communication needs to actually be good too, as a lot of the things you’re asked to describe are intentionally extremely similar, so the players need to be detailed to avoid mistakes. There are also puzzles that involve one person helping the other person navigate through mazes, and as typical as that sounds, a lot of these scenarios have some pretty clever twists. Look, I grew up in the UK in the 80s and 90s and watched a ton of Knightmare, so I was more than up for the challenge. (If you know, you know!)

“Guiding the Explorer around a maze as the Librarian.”

While obviously done on a budget, the presentation is pretty good, featuring the same kind of low polygon, colorful, stylized graphics I mentioned learning to love with Firewatch when describing a lot of other games recently (I really need to find a term for this style…) and yet it manages to be quite creepy a lot of the time too. It’s definitely a vibe, and your mileage may vary, but it works for me.

Interestingly, the whole thing only lasts a couple of hours, though you’ll likely want to switch roles and play it a second time, especially if you’re into achievement hunting. Still, the game is often free, and as such, makes a perfect demo for the rest of the series. That strategy certainly worked on us – we were impressed with it enough to immediately turn around and purchase the sequel, We Were Here Too, which I’m sure I’ll talk about here eventually.

Finally, we’ve just completed our playthrough of The Council. The Council is an episodic narrative heavy adventure game developed by Big Bad Wolf, who are probably best known for their later take on the Vampire: The Masquerade universe with Swansong in 2023. I don’t know too much about Swansong, but it appears to use a lot of the same gameplay mechanics as The Council, though it has significantly worse reviews. Hmm. 🤔 This might just be a result of The Council attracting more of a niche, adventure game loving audience than Swansong, which probably attracted a lot of players hoping for a sequel to the cult classic Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, which it clearly is not.

“If you think these guys are ugly, you should see Sir Gregory Holm!”

I distinctly recall having some hesitations about this game when first coming across it on the Microsoft Store, but my partner was very intrigued and its reviews were surprisingly positive, so we eventually purchased it. It’s funny, we played them far enough apart that I didn’t really compare it to The Quarry while playing it, but now writing this compiled review, I can’t help but to weigh them against each other, at least a little, given that they’re in the same genre of gameplay. On the surface, this does not bode well at all for The Council, but in some ways, The Council is actually much more interesting.

The main reason for my hesitation was the visual presentation. Screenshots and trailers made this game look almost comically bad looking. You have a variety of historical figures, like Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington, with ugly, stylized character models, and hey, there’s some kind of a murder mystery or something afoot too? Seriously, what the fuck is this game?! While I have to stand by that initial impression of the graphics, particularly the character faces, as being bizarre, sometimes exaggerated to the extent of being grotesque, overall, I actually came to enjoy the style once I got used to it. This will no doubt be a divisive point though – I’d expect a lot of people will absolutely loath them. That said, the scenery, particularly inside of Lord Mortimer’s mansion, where you’ll be spending the majority of the game, was well executed. Really, the only technical issues with the visuals are around the character animations, which range from “eh, decent I guess” to utterly abysmal. Well, actually, the bottom of that range would be “not there at all” as we did encounter a few bugged moments where characters weren’t animated at all while their dialog played. All but one of these instances were brief enough to not take us completely out of the game though, thankfully.

“Flashback to classic adventure games.”

The bulk of my impressions were around the gameplay though. On the surface The Council seems to follow a Telltale-like take on the adventure game – a lot of dialog choices, decisions which appear to branch the storyline, and plenty of cutscenes. I’d say that there’s a lot more free roaming and even the odd inventory puzzle in The Council, and there are no real QTE scenes since there are no real action scenes, so this edges it a bit closer to the traditional point and click adventure game of the 90s. Where this gets interesting is that there is a layer of almost RPG-like mechanics on top of all of this: a skill-based system complete with experience points to advance those skills, traits that affect them, and using skills requires spending limited “effort points.” I was initially skeptical…

To go into that all in just a bit more detail, many of your dialog choices and some of your special actions in the game are tied to specific skills. Using these skills requires you to have the skill, of course, and the use of a set amount of effort points, which is reduced depending on what level your skill is at. You level these skills up as you gain experience from chapter to chapter, and there are also books that you can read in limited quantities each chapter, and traits which can sometimes grant you skill points as well. Interestingly, you will still see the options to use these skills even if you don’t have them, which can help guide you to where you might want to allocate skill points later, or in a subsequent playthrough, though every skill gets its turn sooner or later. Your pool of effort points grows as you level up, but can also be affected by items – you’ll find consumables that let you restore some of your points or even make your next skill use free. There’s also one that removes your alterations, which negatively affect the number of effort points you need to use a skill.

“The Council’s dialog system is surprisingly complex.”

The dialog system also has a few other surprises. First, there are “confrontations” which are special dialog events in which you need to choose the correct options in order to convince someone of something or win an argument, that kind of thing, and your success or failure will often cause a decision-like branching of the story. These all felt a lot more tense than normal conversations, even if the stakes weren’t particularly high. Confrontations are particularly affected by that character’s specific vulnerabilities and immunities to certain skills, which are usually discovered the hard way by choosing the wrong dialog option, though there’s another consumable that will temporarily reveal them to you. Finally, we have “opportunities” which are as close as The Council gets to Telltale’s QTEs – moments where you can, if you’re quick enough, move your cursor to an interactive hotspot that appears briefly, usually over part of the character you’re talking to’s face or body. These unlock special dialog or actions, often revealing new information, including vulnerabilities and immunities.

Overall, some of these systems were a bit bewildering at first, but in the end I think they work surprisingly well, and add a nice gamey component to the otherwise rather simple dialog system that most of these sorts of games employ.

Finally, there’s the story itself. If you’re the type of person who likes ancient and old world conspiracy theory along the lines of something like the Da Vinci Code, you might be as drawn in as I initially was. Right off the bat we have something of a “whodunit” mystery, all kinds of mysterious characters and related subplots, and a backdrop of political intrigue complete with secret societies attempting to pull the strings of events across the entire world. I constantly found myself wanting to learn more about what was really going on here, at least until the rather heavy-handed main reveal (something of a twist) comes in a later episode. While I found that twist, which brings in a supernatural element, and especially my character’s reactions to it to be a little silly, by then I was invested enough to say “fuck it” and just roll with it.

“Like I said, confrontations can feel a little tense…”

Unfortunately, the end of the game was a bit of a let down. There was a final confrontation which just… well, it just suddenly ended. As the game summed up how bad of a job we’d done in the last chapter and the post-game character wrap-up started to play, it took my partner and I a full 30 more seconds to realize what had just happened before we looked at each other and let out a simultaneous “OOOOOOooooooooohhhhh!” It was jarring enough that we did something we never do in these kinds of narrative games – loaded up our last save, corrected a mistake we made (an easy to miss but vital item we didn’t pick up) and went through it again, this time achieving a much better, even if it was similarly abrupt, ending. This does speak of one of the game’s strengths though, in that, not unlike The Quarry, there is a good amount of deviation and branching that can take place here, with over a dozen distinct endings. In fact, there was one major decision in the second to last chapter of the game that really had us debating amongst ourselves about which way to go, which should suggest it was an interesting and impactful one if nothing else.

That sums up The Council pretty well. Despite the weird, somewhat janky graphics and the plot that goes to some unexpected places, then ends faaaarrrr too abruptly, I enjoyed the game, especially its take on the narrative adventure mechanics, which has me suddenly much more curious about Vampire: The Masquerade – Swansong, a game that hadn’t really been on my radar even a little bit before.

Unfortunately my dumb ass didn’t take enough screenshots of any of these games, and some of the ones I did take contained spoilers, so instead I’ve opted to steal them from various random places on the net.

Surviving Survival Part 2

As I teased at the end of my original “Surviving Survival” article, Enshrouded was the next game on the menu. Seemingly along with a whole lot of others, previews of this game really caught my eye and I wasted no time jumping in by myself and exploring the world once it hit early access. While I liked what I played, I quickly decided to save it for a future cooperative playthrough, and it ended up being the next game my partner and I played after wrapping up Raft.

“First Steps into Enshrouded’s Embervale”

Unfortunately, this is going to be a pretty quick synopsis, because she totally bounced off of this game. I shouldn’t have been surprised as Enshrouded tends to feel much more action RPG or action-adventure heavy than your typical “tree-puncher” game, while she’s particularly into the building and decorating, as well as the crafting and organizing aspects of these games, often leaving much of the combat, exploration, and gathering up to me. She also commented on how she wanted to play a game where building bases actually has a purpose. That is, in Enshrouded, like in so many survival games, your base is simply a place to store your stuff and do your crafting and, at least up to where we played, serves very little other purpose. She specifically mentioned preferring 7 Days to Die, in which it’s critical that your base also becomes a stronghold due to its “Blood Moon” events and the ever-present threat of wandering zombies.

In retrospect, I guess Enshrouded does feel a bit more like a hybrid between a very adventure-forward, RPG-light action RPG – something like the Fable series, for example – combined with a more stereotypical voxel-based, open world crafting/survival game. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that sounds utterly fantastic to me, but I suppose I’m still trying to figure out exactly what really grabs her about the genre. Still, she’s played through Breath of the Wild and similar games, so I thought she might still find a lot to like in Enshrouded. Sadly, after a couple of sessions, she pretty much lost all interest. Personally, I know that Enshrouded has had something like 4 major patches since I first picked it up in February, so I’m sure it’s only continuing to get more content and develop its already fairly polished systems, and I enjoyed the 10 or so hours I’ve put into it so far, so I think I’ll be going back to it at some point. Whether I go back by myself, with her, or with our larger co-op group, who knows?

“A chaotic sprawl is practically unavoidable in late-game Satisfactory…”

Speaking of our larger group, after wrapping up Grounded, we decided to go for something a little different, and played through an entire run of Satisfactory. I’d never played Satisfactory, nor similar manufacturing focused games like Factorio, so this was all new to me. It’s perhaps a bit of a stretch to toss these types of games into the open world survival category, though there’s certainly a common lineage in my mind. That is, if Astroneer perfected the mindlessly enjoyable mining/gathering aspect of Minecraft’s survival mode, Satisfactory and its ilk are doing the same with late game large-scale crafting and automation, and personally, I fucking loved it!

Dropped onto a planet with practically nothing, the game generously drip feeds you your first string of goals, and soon you’ll have a base of operations and have extracted your first few types of resources. Very quickly, you’ll be installing automatic extractors and the means to power them, and automating getting those resources to your processing and manufacturing devices and/or storage containers… and that, well, that’s basically the whole game!

Satisfactory could very easily cut the umbilical right there and let you figure out how to move up the tech tree on your own, but instead it continues to push you forward via a series of milestones in which specific numbers of certain finished resources are shot up a space elevator in exchange for unlocking new recipes for new and upgraded machines and other gear to help you in your efforts to, of course, meet the next, even more demanding requirements. This progresses until the final couple of tiers have you manufacturing parts used to manufacture parts used to manufacture parts (and so on…) for end products that require multiple of sets of such complex components, turning your once humble factory footprint into a massive sprawl of extraction units, automated assembly, manufacturing machines, mazes of twisting conveyor belts, nuclear power plants belching waste, and delivery drones, trucks, and even trains darting about, blighting the once pristine landscape, while you keep focus on growing and especially optimizing every aspect of your operations.

“Have ramps, will travel.”

There’s also an exploration component of the gameplay, as the players have to explore to seek out more and more natural resources as the demands increase, and find special power-ups hidden throughout the world to increase your output. There’s also a slightly more free-form research component to go along with the milestone system which ties directly into that. Playing cooperatively provides the benefit of letting one or two people go on these scouting runs while others continue to focus on meeting the manufacturing tasks at hand. Building utterly ridiculous transportation systems to bring materials (or even finished components) from extremely remote harvesting sites and exploring some treacherous new biome looking for more cleverly hidden Power Slugs were some of my favorite parts of the game, in fact.

We ended up completing Satisfactory not long before the 1.0 patch was released, which would have added finished versions of some exploration related systems we only had placeholders for, and would likely make the final milestone tier a little less insane than what we went through (which eventually saw us just leaving our server up for a few days while as, close to as large and fully automated as we could will ourselves to get it, we let our collective factory run for hours and hours on end.) Apart from a few annoying bugs (like the often incredibly janky Hypertubes) the game felt finished enough, but had we known it was coming, I think we’d all have preferred to wait until the game was actually finished to do this play through. As it is, I think we’ll be back at some point to see what the actual ending looks like, and what other new goodies the developers add between now and then. All told though, I really enjoyed Satisfactory.

“*Cues Immigrant Song*”

After that, we decided to move back to more traditional territory, and headed to beautiful sunny grasslands and dark forests of Valheim. I talked a fair bit about Valheim in my first Surviving Survival post, though that playthrough was with a group of work friends rather than my normal weekly co-op group, so this was new territory for us. One of the other members of the group had played it before, though closer to its original early access release, and he and I dove right in with building a small village and exploring our surroundings. I think the other two members of our group, including my partner, struggled a little bit with the combat until we got a round or two of gear upgrades under our belts, but overall it seemed like everyone was getting to grips with the gameplay well enough.

Despite being ideally placed for the start of the game – that is, right on the sea and very close to big chunks of black forest and mountain biomes – the randomness of the map found us having to go on epic sea voyages to visit the swamps. Of course, we quickly established a forward base complete with a portal back to our village, but between that, and that biome’s less than friendly inhabitants (we were almost wiped by a Wraith at night more than once, and chased around the entire area by Abominations on several occasions) our group’s enjoyment of the game started to wane considerably, culminating in a group Sunken Crypt clear that went a little sideways, causing one of the party to need to make a seemingly impossible to solo corpse run multiple times, coming perilously close to resulting in a rage quit.

As with Enshrouded, it really wasn’t just the combat or the difficulty, but more something to do with the overall balance of combat, exploration, crafting, and base building (and I suppose how grindy all of the above feels, which can be a bit of an issue in Valheim) that didn’t sit quite well with my partner in particular. Specific complaints centered around the relatively unguided, sandboxy approach to game’s progression goals, and while I ultimately disagree, I can see where those complaints come from. I was disappointed, but it seems Valheim wasn’t quite the game for her either. Like Enshrouded, I would like to get back to Valheim again in the future, but it likely won’t be until the last big content patch is released, and perhaps even on a modded server as well.

“Green Hell? This doesn’t look so bad!”

It’s ironic then, after just mentioning potential struggles with difficulty, that my partner chose Green Hell as our next duo game. She’s been interested in Green Hell, as well as the similarly themed and probably better known The Forest, for quite some time, and that whole time I’d been a little worried about how much of a brutal exercise in survival it might be, as gleaned from various reviews. It turns out that my concern was warranted. While it wasn’t quite as unbearably difficult as it sounded, we definitely found it falling more on the side of frustrating than fun.

In Green Hell the players are thrown into the middle of the Amazonian rainforest. As is typical with these games, you’ll need to gather material to build tools and structures, hunt, fish, and forage for food, and deal with the sometimes less than friend wildlife. In Green Hell, we can add some rather aggressive native tribesmen, both real and imagined, to the list too. What I mean by “imagined” is that native attacks are often one of the end results of the kind of cool sanity system the game employs. That is, certain actions and conditions affect your sanity, making it, along with food and hydration, one of the basic stats you’ll need to keep track of in this game’s simulated version of survival. I mean that literally too, as even imagined native attacks will kill you. In fact, rather a lot of things in Green Hell will kill you. Just about everything you do, from sustaining a minor injury to simply picking up a rock or a log, or hell, even just moving around the environment, can result in some sort of negative status effect which, if not addressed, mostly by means of crafted healing items, can lead to a very bad time.

At first we decided to play the campaign, which does a fair job of justifying why in the hell you’re in the Amazon in the first place, as well as making the Waraha Tribe more than just an lazy depiction of native stereotypes, but after struggling with navigating the campaign’s tasks while dealing with the constant distraction of basic survival for a session or two, we opted to start over in sandbox mode so we could have more opportunity to learn the mechanics without the added pressures of the campaign’s objectives. Early on, we were fortunate enough to locate an abandoned camp relatively close to a river, and started rebuilding it, making it our base of operations as we got to grips with the basics. Soon, we’d learned to get enough fresh water and nutritious food for it to no longer be a massive burden and developed tools to be more and more efficient at gathering. Even after this new level of progress, things like the aforementioned negative effects could still feel like an annoyance at best.

“Never mind…”

Funnily, I think I was the one who was more frustrated this time around. While I would usually get into the game, at least for the first couple of hours of a session, I didn’t look forward to the prospect of playing it again, and at some point all of the struggles and random-feeling deaths started to just feel absurd. She finally came around when, feeling like we had things around our camp reasonably figured out, we decided to venture out, knowing that we’d yet to encounter some of the resources that would be required to continue to tech-up. We quickly ran into new, even more challenging wildlife, and found ourselves having to run back to our base to lick our wounds. Even after over 20 hours of gameplay, we kind of felt like failures.

To be clear, I’m not calling Green Hell a bad game. In fact, I’d hazard to guess that a harsher take on the survival genre was one of Creepy Jar’s goals here. I do think, however, that overcoming some of these challenges felt less rewarding, not to mention more ephemeral, than many of its contemporaries, which, personally, just didn’t provide the dopamine hit I needed to flip the switch from the gameplay loop feeling like a chore to being entertaining. With this genre, that’s probably a thinner line for most of us than we might think. That all said, even after all of this, I’d still really like to go back to the campaign and try to complete it. Unfortunately, by the time we reached that point, my partner was fully ready to move on.

“Sitting on the throne in Abiotic Factor more often means something very different.”

The next game our larger group played was Abiotic Factor. This was one I was entirely unfamiliar with, but everyone else seemed to think it looked fun. Personally, from the trailers I watched and the little bit I read, I really didn’t know what to expect. Scientists living in an underground bunker, having to craft new experimental devices to survive? I don’t know, I was getting some major Fallout and Silo vibes, though mixed with the primitive graphical style and odd mix of multiplayer scares and zaniness of Lethal Company. Okay…

Now that I’ve played it though, the premise of Abiotic Factor is easy enough to convey. You play as a random worker in a massive underground research facility that is researching… let’s just say, some very exotic things. You know, inter-dimensional portals and the new and lifeforms inhabiting them, that kind of thing. It’s your first day of work and, thanks to some impeccable timing, a major catastrophe occurs and you’re trapped inside as the facility goes into lock down. With almost everyone dead or evacuated and the facility in shambles, your objective is to survive long enough to find a way out. Now, if you’re getting Half Life vibes from this description, you’re right on the money. It seems like the first Half Life was a huge influence here, although, as implied by the comparison to Lethal Company, the whole thing is done in a decidedly less than serious way.

The writing is fun, from humorous voice lines to the fact that at times the size and scope of the facility almost feels more like parody than homage. This is also conveyed by some of the mechanics, like the fact that regular bathroom breaks, complete with a minigame to “ease the passage” are one of the survival elements you’ll need to manage. It’s also present in the graphics, which, particularly when it comes to human characters, border on being preposterous, which I’m fairly sure was intentional. For me, this quickly fell away, as the enemies and environments looked nice enough, and I found myself so immersed in the seriousness of the situation that we, as players, found ourselves in, that I forgot all about that aspect outside of the occasional moment of playful downtime back at our base.

“A Defense Robot versus a Composer?! *Grabs popcorn*”

Initially, the game had us exploring abandoned offices, looting anything we could find, tiptoeing around the alien creatures roaming the darkened facility corridors, and hiding for our lives wherever we could barricade ourselves in when night came. These early areas were fun, and definitely got us on the hook. From there, the temporary base we’d established was relocated to a better location and greatly expanded, and the breadcrumbs the narrative dropped for us to head to our next objectives were more than enough to keep us entertained. Despite these objectives quickly devolving into a treadmill of “Go here, no, sorry, go there instead!” like encounters, they led to some unexpected places, including some challenging navigational puzzles, very dangerous enemies, and some memorably tense and scary moments. Of those, Flathill, particularly the library, the damnable Hydroplant, and the deep-dive to the Neutrino Detector, immediately come to mind.

Mechanically, the game is more or less your typical open world crafting/survival game, though some of the decisions in how those pieces are assembled make Abiotic Factor feel like a fresh take to me. New recipes are learned when acquiring new materials, and then researched via a simple minigame where the player attempts to deduce which other components are required to craft the item. This is used quite cleverly to advance the narrative – a new material and/or recipe is introduced which will then require the players to seek out the other required components, which leads to having to explore new areas which in turn means overcoming new puzzles and enemies. Of course, the more exotic the materials you encounter, the crazier some of the items our team of mad scientists can cobble together become – this is not a game where you spend ages progressing from wooden spears to bronze spears to iron spears. In fact, in some ways, the item progression feels a bit more horizontal. It’s not all perfect – ammo for guns is scarce, perhaps being one of the few things you’d ever need to grind, and unless you’ve purposely built your character to use them, shooting them isn’t a whole lot of fun either. Similarly, many of the other items you get along the way feel like they’re of questionable use, though I’m sure this improves considerably with subsequent playthroughs.

“If your swimming pool yields unlimited fish it’s time to call a pool cleaner.”

Exploring is a big part of the gameplay. Thanks to being so in-step with the narrative, you’re always focusing on new parts of the sprawling facility. While travel time isn’t a huge issue (these areas are connected via a tram system to a central hub area) navigating some of these areas, between confusingly complex layouts and a less than generous in-game map, coupled with situationally respawning enemies can be, so it might make sense to build new, smaller bases in each area as you progress, leading to the more nomadic style of base-building that some other games in the genre, like Return to Moria, employ. For our playthrough, we ended up building our base so close to that central hub that we were able to just stick it out, making our excursions into other areas a major group event. It doesn’t seem like my partner, with her preference to hang back at base and work on building, crafting, and logistical matters, would be into this at all, but, thanks to an early agreement that we’d always try to stick close together when running missions, this really wasn’t an issue.

A lot of the other mechanics in the game are similar to other games in the genre too, of course. Besides your bathroom breaks, you need to manage your food and water, sleep/rest, and body temperature. The latter comes into play in some specific areas, where you may need to equip appropriate clothing to stay warm, or keep cool, but overall, none of these are too hard to manage. Food, for instance, feels like it is going to be a huge burden, but we quickly discovered how easy fishing was and, luckily, our base was situated right next to some water for extra convenience. Really, pretty much every challenge we ran into was soon met with some sort of solution to ease the burden, if not outright remove it. I’ve yet to play it myself, but I’ve seen many of the mechanics of this game compared to one of the early standouts of the genre, Project Zomboid, which it seems most people would consider high praise.

“Hey Project Zomboid, we’ve got zombies too!”

So, pretty much exceeding my expectations at every turn, the biggest negative about our experience with Abiotic Factor is actually how our playthrough ended. After struggling through the last area of the game, which definitely felt like a culmination of the gradual difficulty curve we’d felt up to then, the breadcrumbs just… stopped. You see, the game is still in early access, and not unlike Satisfactory, despite feeling reasonably polished the entire way through, simply wasn’t finished. The difference was that we knew we were reaching the end of Satisfactory, whereas Abiotic Factor just abruptly stops. We were left with no way forward and no conclusion to the story, our characters doomed to spend the rest of their lives trapped in the depths of the GATE Cascade Research Facility. That said, we definitely all enjoyed it enough to go back when there is more to do (one of our group, who plays a ton of games, even called it one of his games of the year) though I suspect we’ll be waiting for the game to exit early access before that happens.

That rounds up this game log, though naturally our group has already moved on, and we’re currently exploring the lush planet of Olympus in Icarus. Next time!

A few of these screenshots were swiped from the Steam Community, as I shamefully didn’t take enough good screenshots of my own. I need to get better at that. New Year’s Resolution?